The design of conventional so-called auto cassette exchangers is directed mainly to exchange of cassette tapes itself, by which one of cassette tapes is selected from a stack of those cassette tapes for reproduction of sound or other records thereon and then returned to a chamber or a cassette store after reproduction thereof and a new one is loaded in place thereof. Those kinds of exchangers are fully described in "TAPE RECORDERS" (Author: Tadaaki Tsuono) published by Nikkan Kogyo Shinbunsha, Jan. 30, 1978, pp 224-228.
Whereas those kinds of auto cassette exchangers are capable of extracting in sequence a plurality of cassette tapes for reproduction, most of those exchangers are unable to pick up any desired one of cassette tapes. In some of cassette exchangers such selection is made available with the aid of a larger and bulky construction.
Then, a playback device with new automatic cassette exchange feature has been proposed by which a plurality of cassette tapes are disposed at a predetermined interval along a vertical direction and a selected one of the cassette tapes is inserted into a cassette deck while the cassette deck travels in a vertical direction. This type of automatic cassette exchanging playback device may be configured as low as the stack of the cassette tapes in the vertical direction because of only the need to move the cassette deck in the vertical direction. However, with this type of automatic cassette exchanging playback device, a control circuit is necessary to move the cassette deck in the vertical direction and pick up the selected one of the cassette tapes.